We Can Rebuild Her……..we think

This is the first time since 2003 I’ve had a reason to look forward to September. My mom died on Sept. 29, 2003 so I’ve had a hate/hate relationship with the month ever since. She had been battling lung cancer for about a year. At one point when she was in the hospital it looked like she was getting well enough to come home. I started prepping the house to bring her home and when I went in the next day they told me she was getting worse. No one really explained the process to me so I spent a long time being confused. Even when I went in to see her when she died it just didn’t click. I thought she was asleep. I think somewhere in the back of my mind I kind of understood she was gone. But my heart hadn’t caught up, so I was confused and lost. I only remember bits and pieces of the days after she died. Visiting the funeral home, picking out her coffin, finding clothes for her to wear, flower arrangements. Thankfully my mom had thought of all of this and prepared everything for me. Along with her will was a list of what she wanted me to do for her when she died. There are no words to describe how much that meant to me. Knowing she took the time to take the burden off my shoulders of making those decisions. It was her final act of taking care of her baby girl.

I used to get this pit of sadness and anger inside. Sometime during the next year I came across a song that would spend a lot of time on repeat. Wake Me Up When September Ends by Green Day. Don’t remember how it started, think the video was on in the background and I wasn’t paying attention or the song was on the radio. One of the two. Whatever the case, it went from background music to becoming one of my personal anthems. Course I didn’t care about what the video for the song was about. It was the title that stuck in my head. That’s how I felt. I didn’t want to deal with September at all. I have music for just about every mood I’m in, it helps sometimes, music has always been my default way to get through or deal with something. It’s my outlet. After mom died I don’t remember how long it took before I actively listened to something that wasn’t a melancholy or angry song. There would be songs on at the bar but I always looked for the rock music in the jukebox. Anything with a howling guitar in the background. It was the only music my heart wanted.

At some point I had two songs that were my go-to songs for those moods I just couldn’t shake. When I was somewhere between feeling lost, betrayed, depressed and alone. Wake Me Up When September Ends, and Dare You To Move by Switchfoot. I would put those songs on and curl up and cry my eyes out. Dare You To Move ended up becoming a personal challenge after a couple years. I found the lyrics and had them playing with the song while I cried and something clicked in me. I started trying to listen to the song without breaking down into a mass of sadness and grief. Eventually it got to the point where I could sing-a-long without needing a box of tissues on standby. There were times when I got sad for no reason. My thoughts just drifted off and I would have flashbacks. Of my mom in her hospital bed, talking to her after she slipped into a coma state, kissing her forehead after she died, walking up to her coffin and watching them bury her with my grandfather. So these songs after a while they became a way to reconnect with my inner strength. I had to find a way to get up and keep moving even when I didn’t want to.

So these songs, were and are a big deal to me. For close to 8 years I dreaded September. Until I met my boyfriend. I had told him everything about me, and vice versa. I think the fact that we both went through a traumatic loss made it easier to understand where the other one was coming from. His father died when he was young, so he understood how devastating losing my mom was to me. And I told him about how much I hated September, and he promised me that I wouldn’t be alone in my grief anymore. He would find a way to give me a reason to smile in September. He has. Tomorrow, September 5th, will be our one year anniversary. I know he meant something else along the lines of marriage or a baby. But for me, this is enough, anything else is extra reasons to be happy. So for the first time since 2003 I have a reason to smile this September. And I don’t hate September anymore.

When John Blaine realized 11-year-old Matt Woodrum was struggling through his 400-meter race at school in central Ohio, the physical education teacher felt compelled to walk over and check on the boy.

“Matt, you’re not going to stop, are you?” he encouragingly asked Woodrum, who has cerebral palsy.

“No way,” said the panting, yet determined, fifth-grader.

Almost spontaneously, dozens of Woodrum’s classmates — many who had participated earlier in the school’s field day — converged alongside him, running and cheering on Woodrum as he completed his final lap under the hot sun.

The race on May 16, captured on video by Woodrum’s mother, is now capturing the attention of strangers on the Internet, many who call the boy and his classmates an inspiration to be more compassionate toward each other. A nearly five-minute YouTube video posted this week by the boy’s uncle has received more than 680,000 views.

Woodrum, who has spastic cerebral palsy that greatly affects his muscle movement, said he had a few moments where he struggled.

“I knew I would finish it,” said the soft-spoken Woodrum, who attends Colonial Hills Elementary School in suburban Worthington. “But there were a couple of parts of the race where I really felt like giving up.”